The Idiot President

When I was first out of the Conservatory, I did a two-month stint with a theatre group called Diciembre. It was an established company that had formed during the anxious years of the war, when it was known for its brazen trips into the conflict zone, bringing theatre to the people, and, in the city, for staging all-night marathon shows—pop reworkings of García Lorca, stentorian readings of Brazilian soap-opera scripts, always with a political edge, sometimes subtle, often not at all, anything to keep people awake and laughing through what would otherwise have been the dark, lonely hours of curfew. These shows were legendary among the theatre students of my generation, and many of my classmates claimed to have been present, as children, at one or another of these performances. They said that their parents had taken them, that they had witnessed an unholy union of recital and insurrection, of sex and barbarism, and that they remained, however many years later, unsettled and even inspired by the memory. They were all liars. We were, in fact, studying to be liars. It’s been nine years since I graduated, and I imagine that these days students at the Conservatory talk about other things. They are too young to remember how ordinary fear was during the war. Perhaps they find it difficult to imagine a time when theatre was improvised in response to terrifying headlines, a time when delivering a line of dialogue with a chilling sense of dread did not even require acting. But, then, such are the narcotic effects of peace, and certainly no one wants to go backward.

More than a decade after the war, Diciembre still functioned as a loose grouping of actors and actresses who occasionally put on a show, often in a private home, to which the audience came by invitation only. Paradoxically, now that travel outside the city was relatively safe, they hardly ever went to the interior, so when a new tour was announced I auditioned eagerly. It was a rare opportunity, and, to my surprise, I got the part. Only three of us went—me, a curly-haired actor named Henry, and a short, dark-skinned man who introduced himself as Patalarga and never bothered to give me his real name. They were related, sort of—Henry had, at some point in the distant past, married and then divorced Patalarga’s second cousin, a woman named Tania, to whom they alluded with the sort of hushed respect that tenant farmers might use when speaking of the weather. The two men had been friends for a long time, as long as I’d been alive, and I was pleased to be accepted into their company. I figured it would be a chance to learn from veterans.

Henry wrote most of the plays, and for that tour we were doing a subtle piece of invective he called “The Idiot President.” Though its politics were easy to trace, it was very funny, involving a delicate interaction between an arrogant, self-involved head of state and his servant. Each day, the President’s servant was replaced, the idea being that eventually every citizen of the country would have the honor of attending to the needs of the leader. These included helping him dress, combing his hair, reading his mail, etc. The President was fastidious and required that everything follow a rather idiosyncratic protocol, so the better part of each day was spent teaching the new servant how things should be done. Hilarity ensued. I played the idiot President’s idiot son, Alejo, a role perfectly suited to my youthful skills, and over the course of our rehearsals I came to love this buffoonish adolescent in a way that I hadn’t expected. He was a boastful lout and a petty thief, who was a great source of pride to his father, despite his many shortcomings. The climactic scene involved a heart-to-heart between the servant of the day and my character, after the President has gone to sleep, in which Alejo lets his guard down and admits that he has often thought of killing his father but is too frightened to go through with it. The servant is intrigued—after all, he lives in a ruined country, subject to the President’s disastrous whims, and furthermore has spent the entire day being humiliated by him. The servant probes Alejo’s doubts, and he opens up, voicing his concerns about freedom, about the rule of law, about the suffering of the people, until the servant finally allows that, yes, perhaps killing the President wouldn’t be such a bad idea. For the sake of the country, you understand. Alejo pretends to mull it over, and then kills the startled servant himself, as punishment for treason. He picks the corpse clean, pocketing the man’s wallet, his watch, and his rings, and the play ends with him shouting toward the room where the President is sleeping, “Another one, Father! We’ll need another one tomorrow!”

Patalarga, Henry, and I left the capital in early March, the day after I turned twenty-one. It was summer on the coast, hot and humid, and we rode a bus up into the rainy mountains to the region where Patalarga was born, a part of the country I’d never seen before. Even at the time, I felt certain that I would never see it again. Everything about my life then—every decision I made or failed to make—was predicated on the idea that I’d be leaving the country soon. I expected to join my brother in California before the year was up: my visa was being processed, and it was only a matter of time. This was a very pleasant way to live, actually. It gave me a kind of private strength that allowed me to withstand certain indignities, confident that everything was temporary. We performed in small towns and villages, up and down a wide and gloomy valley, subject to heavy, freezing downpours that were like nothing I’d ever experienced. The skies swirled with blue-black clouds, and when it wasn’t raining the winds blew straight through you. We were greeted warmly in each town, with a certain ceremony and solicitousness that I found charming, and every night the audience gave us a standing ovation that made all our efforts seem worthwhile. Sometimes the villages were just a handful of houses dotting endless yellowish gray fields. Our audience might be a dozen people altogether, a few farmers with ruddy faces, their long-suffering wives and undernourished children, who’d approach Henry after the play, never looking directly at him, and say respectfully, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

The cold nearly destroyed me. In two weeks I lost three kilos, and one night, after a particularly energetic performance, I nearly fainted. When I recovered, we were invited to a party at a one-room adobe house on the outskirts of town. Henry and Patalarga were both on edge, drinking more than usual, because this was the town where Tania lived; apparently she’d been at the show, and might reappear at any moment. I was too ill to worry about that: taking a breath was like swallowing sharp knives, and my head felt as if it might separate from my neck and just float away into the threatening Andean sky. But everyone was exceedingly kind, paying special attention to feeding me and getting me drunk. The liquor helped, and it felt nice to be doted upon. When I started turning blue, the owner of the home, a squat gray-haired man named Cayetano, asked if I wanted a jacket. I nodded enthusiastically, and he rose and walked to the refrigerator, standing before its open door, as if contemplating a snack. I thought, He’s making fun of me, and I heard Henry and Patalarga snickering. But then Cayetano opened the vegetable drawer and took out a pair of wool socks. He tossed them to me, and when he opened the door a little farther I saw that the refrigerator was, in fact, being used as a wardrobe. There were mittens in the butter tray, sweaters and jackets hanging from a wooden bar nailed to the inside walls. Only then did I notice the few perishables sitting on the counter. In this cold, of course, they were in no danger of spoiling.

The gathered men and women told sad stories about the war and laughed at their own suffering in ways that I found incomprehensible. Sometimes they would speak in Quechua, and then the laughter became much more intense, and also much sadder—or, at least, that’s how it seemed to me. When Tania arrived, everyone stood. She had long black hair, which she wore in a single braid, and an orange-and-yellow shawl draped over her shoulders. Older than me but a little younger than my colleagues, Tania was petite, and yet somehow she gave the impression of great strength. She circled the room, shaking hands with everyone—except Henry, who instead received a floating kiss in the air just beside his right ear.

“Are you still acting,” she asked when she got to me, “or are you actually that sick?”

I didn’t know what to say, so when someone shouted, “He’s drunk!,” I was relieved. The room roared, and then everyone sat.

The drinking began in earnest now, and soon a guitar appeared from a corner of the room. It was passed from person to person, making a few laps around the circle before finally Tania kept it. Everyone cheered. She strummed a few chords, then cleared her throat, welcoming the visitors, thanking us all for listening. She sang in Quechua, picking out a complex accompaniment, her agile fingers unrestrained by the cold. I turned to Henry and asked him in a low voice what the song was about.

“About love,” he whispered, without taking his eyes off her.

As the night wore on, I found myself appreciating Tania’s beauty with greater and greater clarity. Henry and Patalarga watched me watching her, alternately glaring and smiling, in a sequence that was impossible to interpret. Much later, when I was finally succumbing to the cold and the liquor, Tania offered to lead me back to the hostel where I was staying. This was noted with feigned alarm, but she ignored it all. The town was small, there was no possibility of getting lost, and we trudged drunkenly through its streets, both of us wrapped in Cayetano’s blanket. “You sing beautifully,” I said. “What was it about?”

“Just old songs.”

“Henry said you were singing about love.”

She had a lovely laugh: clear and unpretentious, like moonlight. “He doesn’t speak Quechua,” Tania said. “Must have been a lucky guess.”

We paused at the door of the hostel. I moved to kiss her, but she just patted me on the head as if I were a little boy. “Drink lots of water,” she said, “and get as much rest as you can.” And then she walked back to the party.

Inside the hostel, the owner gave me a large rubber bladder, swollen with boiling water, and as I prepared for bed I held it in my hands the way one might hold a beating human heart—my own heart, perhaps. I tried to go over my day—what had happened, or what, to my chagrin, had not. But the cold made coherent thought impossible, so I lay down with the bladder pressed against my belly, curling myself around it like a snail. I wondered whether I should have stayed in the city and what my friends were doing at that exact moment. They’d been jealous of me and my tour with Diciembre, and I struggled to remember that. Patalarga and Henry had done this circuit before, were constantly running into old friends. They seemed unfazed by the conditions that were slowly wearing me down. They had lived in the city for decades but did not consider it home.

And it was like this for weeks. In the mornings, weather permitting, we rode to the next town on a rickety bus, or on the bed of a truck piled with potatoes. I’d learned to chew coca leaves by then, had come to enjoy the numbness as it spread over my face, down my neck, and into my chest. The roads were barely wide enough for a horse cart, and often I looked over the face of a crumbling mountain, forcing myself to think of something other than death. Patalarga and Henry recovered from the previous evening with their eyes closed, suspended in deep and peaceful dreams. They were enjoying themselves; me, I was trying to stay alive.

Toward the end of the tour, we arrived at a town called San Germán, which was the remote outpost of an American mining company. The town consisted of a couple of hundred houses that seemed to have been airlifted to the wind-battered top of a desolate mountain, which was surrounded on three sides by even higher, more foreboding peaks. I think it was a silver mine, but it could have been copper or bauxite or something else, and, in a sense, it doesn’t matter: all mining towns are the same. They are pitiless and isolated, often situated in places that might be beautiful were they not so extreme, and defined by a kind of human deprivation particular to the industry. In San Germán, thick clouds hung just above us, and I could smell metal in the air. I had never felt so far away from the world. We were more than four thousand metres above sea level, and the altitude rendered me useless. I spent the first day in the hostel, gripping the sides of the bed as if I were riding a roller coaster. San Germán was a small place, and there was very little to see, but Patalarga and Henry sat by my bedside, regaling me with the invented wonders of the town.

“You must get up,” Patalarga said. “You have to see this place.”

“There’s a replica of the pyramids,” Henry told me, “and it shines golden in the sunlight.”

I opened my eyes and saw his breath gathering in a cloud.

“A miniature Arc de Triomphe,” Patalarga said.

“Cafés, tree-lined boulevards, and the night life—you won’t believe it! Discos like in Batista’s Havana, like Beirut before the war.”

I paid them no attention. The room—indeed, my brain—filled with the concussive sound of their voices. I begged to be left alone, and then they disappeared. I closed my eyes again, and for a few hours I didn’t move. I just listened desperately to the sound of my own breathing.

When my colleagues returned, they were sullen and angry. I could smell the mud that clung to their boots.

“You tell him.”

“No, you tell him.”

From my sickbed, I could hear them pacing. “Someone fucking tell me,” I said. I had intended to shout, but I was weak, and it came out as the raspy plea of a heart patient. I kept my eyes closed. Someone sat on my bed. It was Henry. Bad news. Our first performance was scheduled for the next night, but there was a glitch. There was no electricity, no light. This was not a temporary condition, as we had been told when we checked into the hostel. The only power still running in town went to the homes of the American engineers, on the other side of the mine. “You should see how they live,” Henry said, and described how, behind a high fence, they had created a facsimile of American life. Comfortable suburban homes, neatly paved streets, a baseball diamond.

I sat shivering beneath a half-dozen blankets. It sounded nice.

“Don’t you have a brother in the U.S.?” Patalarga asked.

“Sure.”

“Does he play baseball?”

“How should I know?”

I could barely get the words out. I knew nothing about baseball. In fact, I knew virtually nothing about my brother. He’d left home when he turned eighteen, several years before, and I thought of him only in terms of the visa he was supposed to get for me. It was too cold to waste energy scavenging through childhood memories.

Henry was upset. He spoke quickly, and I could hear the bitterness in his voice. We’d been promised a place to perform for the workers. The workers, the workers—these gallant, dignified men who were our entire reason for existing. We were supposed to do two shows, one for each shift. Our afternoon performance would be unaffected, but the miners on the day shift wouldn’t be able to come. If we did a show at night, it would be in the dark—or only for the engineers. The fucking engineers. Henry was getting upset now, as he described men who spent their days nursing Daiquiris, pausing only to take turns whipping the noble miners.

It sounded positively feudal. “Are they really that bad?” I asked.

“Never mind him,” Patalarga said. “His father was an engineer.”

“Fuck you,” Henry said, scowling.

“Henry here was a star on the company baseball team.”

“Really?”

“Till he started stealing dynamite to give to the rebels.”

“You’re lying.”

Neither would answer me.

A moment later, Henry was complaining again; this time, he tapped his finger on my forehead as he spoke. It felt like a mallet striking the skin of a bass drum, a strange way of showing affection, and I kept my eyes closed through the operation.

“We’ve come to this town for nothing. They’ve made fools of us, and Nelson here is going to die for no reason at all.”

They were talking to each other now.

“We’ve sacrificed a young life—the best this country has to offer!—and we’ll have nothing to show for it. Oh, the tragedy of it all! How he has suffered for his art! But what will we tell his mother?”

“You’re both very funny,” I said. “Seriously.”

That night, they dragged me out into the dark streets of San Germán, all but carrying me. My head and body ached, and the earth beneath me seemed unsteady. I walked with one arm slung over Patalarga’s shoulder, as Henry pointed out the dim yellow lights on the far slope of the hill: those were the engineers’ homes. Behind them, a treacherous mountain peak disappeared into the clouds. I looked at that miserable little settlement and found it hard to feel much antipathy toward the Americans. Nature could have crushed them, and all of us, in an instant.

“Do you see them?” Henry asked. “Can you believe it?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t believe it.”

I would rather have been poor anywhere else in the world than rich here.

We pushed on through the muddy streets. For the play, Henry wore long white gloves, but because of the bitter cold he had taken to wearing them even between performances. They were thin, sateen, probably not very warm, but they looked delicious. Now I noticed Patalarga eying them jealously.

Patalarga considered this for a moment. He turned to me. “I found him in an alley behind the cathedral, huffing glue and talking about how mean his daddy was.”

I didn’t say anything, nor did I let go of Patalarga. Without him, I would’ve fallen.

Henry didn’t appear to be listening.

“All that change we wanted,” Patalarga said. “And still the dark-skinned one plays the servant. And still the dark-skinned one dies in the end. Isn’t that something?”

Henry shrugged. “It’s because you’re so good at it,” he said.

We made it to San Germán’s only restaurant, and by the light of a kerosene lamp ate food warmed by a kerosene stove, so that everything smelled and tasted of fuel. We were in a sour, helpless mood. Henry and Patalarga weren’t talking, and it took all my strength just to keep from slipping off my chair and onto the cold cement floor. Still, after a meal and some tea, I had recovered a bit. We were nearly finished when some old miners walked in, carrying their helmets. Even in the dark, Patalarga recognized them from his days as an organizer. They joined our table and spoke in hushed tones about the conditions underground, which had improved somewhat since Henry and Patalarga’s last visit. Better ventilation, better safety. Ten-hour shifts, down from fourteen.

“But no electricity.”

The miners shrugged. They had hard, weathered faces. “It’s coming, and, anyway, the mine is well lit,” one of them said. His name was Ventosilla. It was written on his helmet, which he placed on the table. He flicked a switch and the headlamp came on, casting a vivid patch of light on the wall of the restaurant. Ventosilla turned it off and on a few times, and we all stopped to admire it.

He tapped the headlamp with his fingernail. “Halogen.”

“And you all have those?” Patalarga asked.

The miner nodded.

My colleagues grinned.

The next night, we performed “The Idiot President” in a large tent made of blankets, by the combined lamplight of fifty miners. There were children and wives in attendance as well, and even a few American engineers who deigned to join the fun. I was feeling better, though not yet myself, whatever that means. I hadn’t felt like myself since we’d left the city, since the bus had begun climbing into the clouds, but the sight of this makeshift theatre, abuzz with expectation, the halogen lights flitting every which way, made me hopeful. Backstage was actually just outside the tent, where the three of us stood, freezing and jittery, unusually excited, peeking in occasionally to see the crowd as it gathered.

When the tent was full, we slipped inside, to the relative warmth of the stage. The view was breathtaking: the crowd sitting on a rickety set of bleachers, a bright field of stars gleaming in the heavens. I turned to Henry and Patalarga, and saw that they were lost in it, too. This was the sky we had barely seen, the sky that had been hidden behind thick black rain clouds for the previous six weeks. We were introduced by the local union rep, and this night, like every night, the crowd cheered when they heard the name Diciembre, the lights bobbing up and down, as the miners nodded with satisfaction.

I ceded the stage to my colleagues, and sat just off to the side. They began. With hunched shoulders and a face wracked with worry, Henry imbued his idiot President with a certain deranged gravitas, like Nixon in his last days, or Allende contemplating the tanks surrounding La Moneda. He paced the stage barking nonsensical instructions at his flummoxed servant—and no one has ever owned “flummoxed” as expertly as Patalarga did that night. I knew the whole play by heart, so mostly I concentrated on the miners’ headlamps, which together formed a limpid pool of white onstage, shifting ever so slightly as the dialogue Ping-Ponged from one speaker to the other. When I stood, just before my cue to come on, the lights shifted stage right, so much so that Patalarga, standing opposite me, disappeared briefly in the sudden darkness.

Even in the dim light, I could see him smiling.

Toward the end of the play, we hit a rough patch. We could tell instantly. Henry delivered a line that usually got a laugh, but now it fell flat. We were losing the audience—the lights moved up and down, or side to side, wandering, and in an instant we were performing at dusk, when just a moment prior it had been morning. Never before or since has it been so easy for me to read a crowd, to get feedback so transparent and immediate. The failing light energized us, and we rallied. Minutes later, the tent was again quaking with laughter, the stage as bright as a landing strip, and I can note, with not a small amount of pride, that my last lines, the ones I shouted to my sleeping father, the President, were delivered on a fully lit stage, with the complete attention and collaboration of the miners of San Germán and their halogen headlamps. There was no curtain to close, no stage lights to dim, and I stood there for a moment after the play had ended, bathing in the glow, enjoying myself.

Why not?

A few weeks later, I was home again, and for years afterward, when one or another of the productions I was a part of failed, I thought of that night. I was invited on another tour with Diciembre, but it was more out of politeness than anything else. My middle-class life had rendered me unable to handle the rigors of the road. I declined. I’ll be leaving soon anyway, I thought, but I never did. Occasionally, I performed with Henry and Patalarga locally, and we remained friendly. Whenever I ran into one of them, at a show, at a bar, on the street, we always embraced, shared a laugh, and spoke fondly of that night in San Germán. I knew that they remembered the performance as well as I did, though they had forgotten other details—my name, for instance. They called me Alejo, without shame or apology. I didn’t mind. I liked them both. I had learned from them, and could learn from them still. Of course, invoking San Germán was an invitation to philosophize, but that was precisely the point. I would listen, just as I had on that trip, and watch Patalarga’s or Henry’s chest swell with pride. You make do. You manage. You take what the audience gives you and return it to them, only better, burnished by love and commitment. They give you light, and you give them truth. Etc. I liked hearing Henry and Patalarga talk, because no one my age ever spoke that way. Not about theatre, not about politics. Not even about love. It made us uncomfortable.

A few years passed, and one day I found myself hopelessly out of work. I’d made too many enemies, taken everything too lightly. My visa had never come, and I could no longer pretend I’d be young forever. My brother called every now and then, but only at my parents’ house, and sometimes months would go by without our exchanging a word. I began auditioning for the soap operas I’d sworn I’d never do again: jilted lovers, home-wrecking womanizers. But I didn’t get any of these parts. I was going broke. I thought about giving up my rented room and moving home, but the idea was too humiliating. My father, for his part, was relentlessly optimistic. “Your brother will send the visa. You’ll go to America. You’ll go to California. You’ll be in the movies. Write to your brother, remind him,” he said, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t think even my father believed it anymore. Still, he kept me apprised of the weather where my brother was, as if I needed to know what clothes to pack. “There are forest fires all over California,” he said to me one day. “Hundreds of them.”

I just stared at him. That night, I imagined this place I’d never been, its skies blurred with red-brown smoke, and its sun—which was not our sun—setting against the ashy backdrop of a regional catastrophe. I considered the possibility that what my father wanted was simply to have me out of his way. While I was worried about failing him, perhaps he was simply hoping that I would become someone else’s problem.

The following week, I found myself reading the script for a small, recurring role on a local soap opera. It was a six-episode run—not bad—after which my character was to be killed, off-camera. He was a police informer, appropriately troubled by the complicated ethics of betraying his friends, a man who lived in the full expectation that these transgressions would cost him his life. The character’s name was, to my great satisfaction, Alejo, and suddenly I felt more confident than I had in months. Though this character and the Alejo I had played with Diciembre were two entirely different people, reading the script felt like running into an old friend. How this country has changed, I thought: the son of the President is now an ordinary snitch, a man doomed to look over his shoulder for six one-hour episodes, and then die invisibly, his passing just a footnote to a larger drama that has little to do with him.

I was so excited that I told my parents about the audition. I told my friends. Alejo, I thought, we meet again. I even thought of tracking down Henry and Patalarga, though I hadn’t seen them in a year or more, just so we could all have a laugh about it. By then, Diciembre was on semi-permanent hiatus, and the country had become frankly unrecognizable. It was possible to walk the now bustling streets of my city and forget why I’d ever wanted to leave. Global metal prices were at record highs, and the newspapers were announcing seven-per-cent growth. All this prosperity was dispiriting; it was the one thing I’d never expected. I’d never been back to those towns I had visited with Diciembre, though some of my peers had—on vacation, during the dry season, with their spouses and overweight kids, to see a bit of the country as it once was. At the first sign of discontent, the government ran television ads showing images of provincial roadblocks, angry campesinos tossing stones at police, the screen stained an ominous and familiar shade of red. The stern voice-over warned the rural poor to be patriotic, and not ruin it for the rest of us.

Henry and I met on a winter afternoon at a café in Asylum Downs. It was the day before my audition. He had no phone, no e-mail, and I’d got a message to him through a mutual friend who lived in his neighborhood. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and gave me a big hug, clapping my back heartily. We sat at an inside table, protected from the damp. It was great to see him—he hadn’t changed at all—but where was Patalarga?

Henry rubbed his eyes, and pushed his heavy curls down with his palms. “Our friend,” he said in a helpless voice, “is no longer with us.”

I was stunned. I sank into my chair. “When?” I managed to ask.

He looked down into his coffee cup. “Nine months ago, ten.”

“Jesus.”

“I know,” Henry said, but then he was laughing. “The jerk moved to Barcelona. Imagine!”

“You asshole,” I muttered.

“It’s just you and me, Alejito,” Henry said. “Father and son.” He held out his hand. “Laugh!” he ordered. “You were always such a serious boy.”

This was a line from “The Idiot President.” I took his hand and gave him a weak smile. The shock was draining away—Patalarga was alive, after all, and I should be happy. We sipped our coffee.

In any case, there was other news. Henry had a daughter now, and she had changed his life. He saw her two or three times a week, and dedicated everything he wrote to his little girl.

“So you’re writing a lot?” I asked.

Henry shrugged. “Some.”

I told him about Alejo the snitch. I even took out the script and talked him through the first episode, where Alejo is caught stealing wiring from a construction site and avoids jail time by offering information on a local street gang. The dialogue was good, nice hardboiled stuff, and I could scarcely contain my enthusiasm. Henry listened carefully, nodding all the while.

“It’s glorious,” he said. “Written just for you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really feel like it is.”

After a while, Henry said that he had a question, but he didn’t want to offend me. He made me promise not to take it the wrong way. “Sure,” I said.

He tapped his fingers on the wooden table. “Weren’t you supposed to go somewhere?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it was all you ever talked about out there.” He paused. “Every day, constantly. We figured it was the altitude. We could hardly stand it, Patalarga and I.”

“Really?”

Henry nodded.

In my recollection of our two months in the mountains, I had barely ever spoken of leaving. I’d carried the notion with me, of course, but had held this private reassurance very close, like a charm or a lucky coin. Knowing that it would all pass was what had got me through.

“We learned to tune it out,” Henry said, “because we liked you. We really did. Still do.” He reached across the table and pinched my cheek affectionately. “Son,” he added. “So why didn’t you leave?”

Outside, a phalanx of pigeons had landed in the avenue’s concrete median, swirling like a dust storm around an overturned trash can. I stared at them for a while, admiring their hunger.

“Everything got so good around here,” I said.

Henry nodded. “Of course,” he said. “That’s just what I was thinking.”

We said goodbye outside the café, on the busy avenue. Henry wished me good luck, and I promised to let him know how it turned out.

I nailed the audition, and waited optimistically for a callback. I measured the passing of time by the progress of the fires in the distant north. My old man gave me daily updates, and I pretended to listen. Five hundred, a thousand, two thousand fires. After a month, they had burned out, and I was still waiting. ♦

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